Not unless I want to spend the next twenty or thirty years as a captain, too, at any rate.

"That's not what I was talking about, either," the Battle Fleet officer said after a moment. "Or, not directly, anyway."

"Then just what are you talking about, Daud?" she demanded.

"They provided us with really good sensor resolution, don't you think?" he responded—rather obliquely, she thought.

"So?"

"I mean, it was really good resolution," he pointed out.

Teague sat back in her chair, wondering where he thought he was going with this, and it was his turn to sigh.

"Didn't it occur to you to wonder how they happened to be able to provide us with that kind of data?" he asked.

"No, it didn't." She shrugged. "After all, what diff—"

She broke off abruptly, her eyes widening, and al-Fanudahi nodded. There were very few traces of his earlier humor in hisexpression now, she noticed.

"I've put their data through the computers half a dozen times," he said, "and it keeps coming out the same way. That's shipboard-quality data. Actually, it's pretty damned good even for first-line shipboard sensors. Better than anything smaller than a battlecruiser—or maybe a heavy cruiser—should have been pulling in. So where did they get it?"

Teague said nothing for several seconds, then shook herself and swallowed a couple of more spoonfuls of her rapidly cooling bisque. She was only buying time, and she knew he knew it, but he waited patiently, anyway.

"I don't know," she admitted finally. "Are you thinking that maybe it's too good? That the quality of the data is evidence it's actually a fake?"

"No, it's not a fake," he said flatly. "No way. They'd have to know we're going to get our own ships' data in the end. If they'd faked it, we'd find out eventually, and I don't think we'd be particularly amused by their little hoax."

"Then . . ." she said slowly.

"Then I only see four real possibilities, Irene." He held up his left hand, counting his points off on its fingers as he made them. "First, the Manties have somehow developed a shipboard sensor that can get this kind of resolution from outside missile range of our ships. Second, the Manties have some sort of recon platform whose stealth is so good that none of our sensor crews noticed it was there even at what must have been point-blank range. Third, they've managed to come up with some kind of stealth so good that they got an entire starship that close without anyone noticing. Or, fourth, Admiral Byng opted to blow three Manticoran destroyers out of space without warning while allowing a fourth ship that must also have been well inside his missile range to sail merrily on its way. Now, which of those do you think is most likely?"

She felt a distinct sinking sensation as she gazed at him.

"It had to be a recon platform," she said.

"My own conclusion, exactly." He nodded. "But that leads us to another interesting little question. I'm not familiar with any recon platform in our inventory that would have pulled in data this good even if it had been inside energy range, must less missile range. Are you?"

"No," she said unhappily.

"I'm trying to remind myself that we still don't have anything from Byng," al-Fanudahi said. "Maybe he did pick up something and then went ahead and fired anyway, but I find that difficult to believe even of him. And here's another interesting little point to consider. Even if it was a remote platform, there had to be someone out there monitoring its take. I'm inclined to wonder if even Josef Byng—and, by the way, I think you were doing cockroaches a disservice there a minute ago—would be stupid enough to kill three destroyers and their entire crews while he knew he was on camera!"

"Which suggests the Manties do have shipboard stealth capability good enough that he never realized this Chatterjee had deployed at least one trailer on his way in," she said even more unhappily.

"That's exactly what it suggests to me, at any rate," he agreed.

"Crap," she said very, very softly, looking down at her lobster bisque and suddenly not feeling very hungry after all.

"Listen, Irene," he said equally quietly, "I know you've been being careful to keep your mouth shut, but I also know you have a working brain, unlike altogether too many of our esteemed colleagues. You've had your own suspicions about all of those 'ridiculous' reports from the SDF observers, haven't you?"

She looked back at him, unwilling to confirm his suspicions even now, but she knew he saw the truth in her eyes, and he nodded.

"What I thought," he said. Then he smiled crookedly. "Don't worry. I'm not about to invite you to commit professional suicide by suddenly announcing that you, too, believe that every spacer in the Manticoran Navy is three meters tall, impervious to pulser fire, and able to snatch speeding missiles out of space in his bare teeth. I've had a little experience myself with the consequences of being 'overly credulous' and 'alarmist.' In fact, Admiral Thimár himself saw fit to 'counsel me' on my obviously distorted pet theories. But look at this data. No, it's not a smoking gun, not conclusive proof, but the implications are there, aren't they? The Manties have to have a significantly more capable level of technology than anyone here on Old Terra is willing to even consider. For that matter, I'm coming to the suspicion that at least some of their toys aren't just better than most people think they have but actually are better than ours are, as well. When you couple that with some of the reports about their missile ranges at Monica, or the ridiculous salvo sizes some of the system-defense force observers say they can generate . . ."

He shook his head, and his eyes were dark. Worried.

"They can'tall be true," she protested quietly. "The rumors, I mean. Manticore's only one tiny little star system, Daud! All right, so it's a rich little star system, and it's got a hell of a lot bigger navy than anybody else its size. But it's still one star system, however many other systems it may be in the process of annexing. Are you seriously suggesting that they've managed somehow to put together a better, more effective R and D establishment than the entire Solarian League?"

"They don't have to have done that," he said flatly. "The League could be ahead of them clear across the board, but that doesn't mean the Navy is. These people have been fighting a war for better than twenty T-years, and they started their military buildup way the hell before that. You think maybe they could have been working really hard on weapons R and D in the process? That maybe, unlike us, they've been looking at real combat reports, instead of analyses of training simulations where the 'secret details' get leaked to all the senior participants before they even begin the exercise? That, unlike us, the people building their weapons and evaluating their combat doctrines might once have heard of a gentleman named Charles Darwin? Compared to someone who's been fighting for his life for two decades, we're soft, Irene—soft, underprepared, and complacent."

"And even assuming you're right, just what the hell do you expectme to do about it?" she demanded, her voice suddenly harsh with mingled anger, frustration, and fear. Not just fear for the consequences to her career, either. Not anymore.

"At this particular moment?" He looked at her levelly for a heartbeat or two, then his nostrils flared. "At this particular moment, I don't expect you to do anything except what you've been doing. Hell, for that matter I don't propose to make the full extent of my 'alarmist conclusions' part of my official report. Even if I did, it would never get past Cheng. And if it miraculously got past him somehow, you know damned well that Thimár would kill it. Or Kingsford himself, for that matter. It's too far outside the received wisdom. I'm going to go ahead and raise the question of exactly what sort of platform could have gathered the data, but I'm not going to offer any conclusions about it. If someone decides to ask me about it, I'll tell them what I think, but, frankly, I hope they won't. Because without a lot more to go on than the inferences I've been able to draw, I'll never convince the powers that be that I'm not crazy. And if they decide I'm crazy, they'll shit-can my arse so fast my head will spin, which means I'll be able to accomplish exactly nothing if the wheels do come off.